King Electrical Services owner John King was shot by a person who appears to be from one of the many unions who have targeted his workers, Toledo News Channel 11 WTOL reports. King is the largest non-union electrical contractor company in the area of southeastern Michigan near the Ohio border.

He has a long history of being on the receiving end of union-related violence, and this case doesn’t appear to be any different. Before shooting him, the gunman etched the word “SCAB” into the side of King’s SUV.

The altercation started when King woke up late last Wednesday to find someone in his driveway. He described the intruder as a “silhouette figure” because he didn’t see the person clearly enough to offer a description. The individual was attempting to vandalize his SUV. When King went outside his Lambertville, Mich., home to confront the person, the vandal shot him in the arm.

Labor unions have attempted, unsuccessfully, to organize King’s employees, and he has been subjected to one legal nightmare after another in the process.

“Since he’s been in business, in addition to the legal battles and verbal abuse, King’s company has been vandalized and threatened on numerous occasions,”LaborUnionReport.com reports. “Unfortunately, the vandalism has never stopped. This year alone, he’s had to report three incidents of damage to police. This doesn’t include the incidents of stalking he and his men have to go through while they’re working.

“In one incident earlier this year, rocks were thrown through the front windows of his shop, one of which had the word ‘kill’ written on it.”

Having worked in telecom for many years, both in the field as an engineer and in the design stage as a project manager for new construction, I can honesly say there are no winners here. Both unions, the CWA and the IBEW, are as crooked as a WV back road, but Verizon is no better. On the one hand the unions are obstructionist when it comes to actually performing any useful work, being the kings of the not my yob fan club, in that when something needs to be done they consider union work rules before they consider the needful outcome of any given task. They will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs much in the same manner that they killed steel and the auto industry in this country. Many is the time I had to go to a Verizon site to perform their work for them because their linemen were too lazy and incompetant to do the job for which they were being paid.

On the other hand we have a company that is making record-breaking profits, and riding herd on the hardline side of the business for being unprofitable. That is like saying that the custodial staff at a hospital is unprofitable, or the taker fleet at Exxon is unprofitable. Try running a business without them and see where the profits go. Internet, cell towers, cable TV and long distance service all run on landlines that have to be maintained and upgraded. No landline, no revenue. If it were not for landlines communications as we know it would never have come to be what it is today as satelittes can only handle about 8% of all comms traffic if every bird worked all the time, and every orbital slot was filled with a bird. Likewise cell phones, which would become like party lines if bandwidth had to be used to pass traffic from tower to tower over the airwaves instead of running it across landlines.

This strike is a microcosm of the midset of most people in this country, with no winners possible, and only a bunch of delusional losers engaged in a fight to be masters of a rotting dungheap. Both sides are bent on ruining the business involved for short-term gains, so it doesn’t really matter how it turns out because the whole country works this way. Or doesn’t, as is sadly the case.